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Interview: Microsoft's Scott Henson Continued..

A Few Questions
After Henson's explanations of Microsoft's current game-related initiatives, I asked a few more general questions about recent announcements and revelations. He talks about current and future plans for Live, his thoughts on Sony and Nintendo, and more.

Shack: Microsoft recently announced that it will be opening up its Xbox Live platform to developers. Since we've already seen certain companies make use of their own servers for various purposes in Xbox Live games [for example in the case of Bungie's stat tracking for Halo 2 or EA's authentication servers for its online games], what is the significance of this announcement?

Scott Henson: A couple things. One is, the big news for developers is that what we've delivered to Bungie and these guys in the past was a little hard to set up, and it wasn't the most managable in the world. We've added more scalability to our servers, we've added more management code to make it easier for developers to maintain these servers. So that's kind of the big win, the enabling technology.

Shack: So the difference is that it's now officially supported.

Scott Henson: It's an official part of our Xbox developer kit. Before you kind of got it off to the side. At the end of the day, all of this is about enabling developers on our platforms to bring better games to our platforms. I've got guys here [at GDC] giving 60 [combined] hours of [development-related] sessions. We're getting great feedback from the developers, and we're really excited to be delivering. At the end of the day, my job is all about developers, developers, developers [developers] and I'm super excited about what we're doing at GDC.

[Note: For some reason, I completely neglected to bring up Steve Ballmer after Henson's apparently coincidental phrasing of "developers, developers, developers." My sincerest apologies.]

Shack: Do you ever see Marketplace expanding beyond the current 50MB game limit? You've got demos on there upwards of a gigabyte, so will we ever see full-scale titles?

Scott Henson: Well, a couple things. One is, technically, we're obviously able to distribute that--I mean, there's a 1.2 gigabyte demo up there for Project Gotham Racing 3. So technically we can distribute all kinds of different things. But the retail members of our ecosystem are super important to us, and that relationship is super important to gamers as well, so I think that what you'll see is that we'll continue to go the path that we're on. Byte-sized games will continue to go through Xbox Live Arcade, games that would never find a home in retail. Geometry Wars would never find a home in retail, right? You will find an outlet in Xbox Live Arcade. In retail, these five dollar games just wouldn't make sense. But I don't think you're going to see, any time in the near future, full-scale games. You will have fully-featured demos so you'll know what the games are like. One of the most gratifying things I did on the the tour I just did in the last couple weeks, was to hear the gamer press play The Outfit demo and tell me "You've got to check it out, because the multiplayer part is the killer part of that game." So of course I went and checked it out and they were right, it's pretty amazing. So that's oen of the powers of Marketplace in general, that people can check this out and say, "This is a pretty cool game here, I've got to go buy it." Obviously we had hundreds of thousands of downloads with Fight Night [Round 3] and that translated into a tremendous success in February, so I think that's going to continue to be a big hit.

Shack: There are currently some interactions between Xbox 360 and Windows systems. Are we going to see any additional functionality in this regard when Vista rolls around?

Scott Henson: I'm thinking. Obviously, we have the ability to stream music, to stream photos. One of the most requested features has been the ability to stream videos. That's something we're looking into. We haven't announced anything, but I think with Vista you'll see that becoming a more pervasive thing. I'm not making an announcement here, but that's something we're looking closely at. Of all things I can think of off the top of my head, that's one that probably will go in. Other than that, you'll see better quality, better compression technology, audio quality will continue to improve. That doesn't mean there won't be other things.

Shack: Speaking of Vista, do you have any plans of making the Vista version of Halo 2 playable online against Xbox players?

Scott Henson: It's certainly something that we've talked about. Whether that will be enabled in this timeframe at this point is not clear. I think right now they're just trying to figure out how to make the most of the Windows platform, how to make it a great Windows title, what would make it a unique Windows title. I don't know exactly what they've talked about, but I think they've got some pretty cool plans for Windows gamers just in general.

Shack: How will we be seeing the Dashboard improve on the 360?

Scott Henson: I don't think we've given an official date yet, but in the not so distant future you will see another update that will improve a lot of how stuff is sorted and shown in the Marketplace, just to make it more efficient. We're going to do a lot of nip and tuck cleanup work. One of the biggest things is the ability to download things in the background.

Shack: Thank you!

Scott Henson: Yeah, as an avid Marketplace downloader I can say hallelujah! I don't know what the official PR line is on the availability, but it's not that far away.

Shack: Do you have any feedback or reactions to what Sony has been announcing over the past couple of days?

Scott Henson: Well I was in both the Nintendo keynote and the Sony keynote, and for what it's worth from a keynote perspective I really enjoyed the Nintendo keynote, it was fun. The Sony keynote, I just walked away very flattered.

Shack: Ouch!

Scott Henson: Well, you know, I did, I was thinking, "Wow!" You know, I've been working on Xbox Live for a long, long time, and when I first started people were like, "Unified service? On broadband? With voice? Are you insane?" We had these conversations and people would just look at us crosseyed, saying, "Are you crazy?" I left the keynote this week just thinking, "Wow, we've really fundamentally changed people's expectations of what a next generation console should do, including Sony." And I was just really excited about that. I think it really validates our strategy. I'm very aware of the road they have ahead of them. I'm very aware of how much it took to invest in these technologies and to make them seamless. It is a big, big undertaking. Worldwide billing with microtransactions is a big, big undertaking. I was part of the development team and I know what that means. So, they've got a very aggressive schedule ahead of them. Best of luck delivering first libraries next week. Final network coming up in September is very aggressive. We were very fortunate that for us it was up and working a couple years before we actually launched Xbox 360. So those were my initial reactions.

(Turn the page for Scott Henson's thoughts on Nintendo and physics cards.)

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